Increasing Cybersecurity Awareness and Collaboration in Organisations and Local / Regional Networks: The CS-AWARE-NEXT Project

The Horizon Europe CS-AWARE-NEXT project aims to improve the cybersecurity management capabilities of organisations and local or regional supply networks. These organisations operate in a highly dynamic cybersecurity environment and are required to comply with European legislation, such as the Network and Information Security (NIS/NIS2) directive. To effectively manage cybersecurity, these organisations need to adopt a more dynamic and collaborative approach, building on a shared situational awareness of potential cybersecurity issues relevant to the organisations. It is well known that flexibility increases when the availability of information increases. The goal of the paper is to discuss the architecture required to gather and share relevant information with the organisations in the network. Smart collaboration about cybersecurity data requires intelligent selection of data, adapted to the goals of the collaborative scenario, as well as object oriented interfacing, facilitating the inclusion and selection of particular data types during online interaction. Collaboration about specific data, used as evidence or as resource for discussion, has to take place online due to the opportunistic nature of data selection. In contrast to traditional technologies, we highlight the need for experimenting with novel approaches to information systems engineering which are capable of addressing emerging needs from the inclusion of dedicated Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning modules, and components for self-healing, self-protecting, and self-configuration.